Shoot part 3: the bathroom

On 3rd May, we packed a smaller selection of equipment and travelled to Musselburgh to the bathroom location in a church hall. This shoot day involved a lot equipment transport and setup in a short space of time but, overall, I think it went very smoothly and we managed to mainly stick to our original plan. This was partly thanks to it being quite a short scene in a controlled location. There was some diversion from the tramlines and confusion about how long each shot was running for but this had less of an impact than it did for the field scenes. The small space was also somewhat of a challenge but we were able to rig up a wireless monitoring system (thanks, Andrew!) so that most of the crew could view the action from the hallway.

I’m very pleased with the lighting in most of this scene. For the interior of the cubicles, I used an Aputure 300X through the window behind the talent as backlight/upstage key. I balanced this by using a Kinoflo Celeb 250 as ‘room tone’ to make sure the talents’ faces weren’t underexposed and that the window wasn’t clipping. I also attached an Aladdin 100 to the room’s existing light fixtures to suggest overhead fluorescent tubes while maintaining a level of control and allowing them to be balanced with the light coming through the window (my ‘point of control’ as the Wandering DP would say…). I’m less happy with the lighting for the part of the scene by the sinks, though I do think it works as the interior of a somewhat dingy bathroom. I found it particularly hard to create contrast and modelling in the wide shot and think the lighting on Tiana’s face looks quite flat – hopefully I can do something to fix this in the grade.

Leave a comment

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

Up ↑